I go on about how 3D printing and Thingiverse (and of course, the users who know their way around 3D tools) are well-aligned to provide things which aren’t just good enough to serve but which are precisely suited to their desired application, but this thing speaks for itself rather boldly.

It does what it’s for.  More or less exactly.

Looking at the thumbnail for this, I literally thought, “oh man, that’s beautiful, no way will it print on a thermoplastic extrusion system though,” before clicking it to discover that that is exactly what has been done here.

What you’re looking at is actually the crystalline configuration of diamond, which is also the exact same configuration of the atoms in silicon semiconductors.  In semiconductors, different atoms are pushed into the lattice, replacing silicon atoms, to alter the local average number of electrons, which in turn makes it possible to build diodes and transistors in high densities through a combination of technologies related to photography and, well, clay firing, which enables complex but inexpensive circuits like microcontrollers, which in turn enables low-cost 3D printers, which is where we get models like this one…

So it’s all connected really.

This is video of a 3D-printed, Arduino-controlled animatronic tail.  It’s a great example of design following nature, with vertebrae and tendons being modeled by mechanical substitutes, and while you might be able to replicate this version of the design with more traditional prototyping methods, the 3D printing makes it both easier to duplicate and easier to reconfigure.  And a few of the improvements I can imagine, such as making the vertebrae interlink like biological ones to be more firmly linked to one another would be really tricky with hand tools, but pretty easy on 3D printing…

Thing is, I’m not entirely kidding…

The neural interface captures data from her brain and a microcontroller transmits it to the ears.  It’s easy to become dismissive of stuff that’s “just X, Y, and Z hacked together,” especially if you see it happening all the time, but let’s look at this, as it is, for what it is, and that’s a neurally-linked robotic prosthesis, purely for entertainment purposes.  The parts aren’t even that expensive…

But I did, because this one is really pretty.  A finial is basically anything you put on the top of a flagpole, steeple or other architectural structure to make it look neat.  This one would have been pretty attractive in opaque plastic, but in PLA with multiple colors of LED glowing through it, it’s pretty serious.

Now of course someone has to start putting this on top of other things, because that’d be sweet.

So leaving out the fact that a nested Reuleaux Triangle that you can fit in your pocket is something that just oozes cool and, were you to whip it out at a party (at least the kind I go to) have everyone instantly fascinated even if it weren’t something you downloaded and printed, mechanisms of this type particularly interest me because they natively react well to extruded plastic 3D printing.

Captive parts aren’t always possible in a project, when it works, it’s magic.

Design 3D surfaces by drawing bitmaps!  The script writes directly in GCode, the native language of 3D printers, so this is definitely a time to know your extruder behaviors.  Scripting directly in GCode has a lot of advantages, like simplicity, since you often can get away without really wrestling 3D geometry and mesh files.

You can also code in whatever language you like, as long as it can save to ASCII text files.  This code generator is written in Lua!

Bicycle shops are already places where a pretty dazzling array of mechanical engineering feats are accomplished (after all, a bicycle shop built the first airplane), and happily this tradition continues with a plethora of bicycle widgets from the classic to the cutting edge, and from straightforward keep-it-going fixes like this one to pure artistic expression, enabled by 3D printers.

(Little wonder also that a recent episode of MakerBot TV featured a whole-bike makeover.)

What can I say, I’m a sucker for a pretty sprocket.  And this pinwheel extruder drive gear is just gorgeous, and shows off that principle I keep going on about where making things more detailed or adding fiddly bits or cutting cool-shaped holes doesn’t really change the cost when you’re 3D printing.

The geared extruder module these gears are for also gets a fair bit of love from the community, probably because it’s such a large, inviting gear to add widgets to.  (Speaking of cool things with gears, that heavy-duty-looking gear box I linked a while ago?  Ended up driving a dimmer switch.  Which is awesome.)

The original model of this dinosaur skull was printed using a commercial machine with soluble supports, but the Makerbotted version looks pretty darned good.  Splitting it in two pieces and printing it fairly large reportedly did wonders for the print quality.  A great model, and really excellent print quality here!